developing world

What Catholicism didn’t do amid COVID shouldn’t obscure what it did
- Jul 8, 2020
ROME – When we look back at the Catholic experience of the coronavirus, it will be tempting for closures and suspensions to be what we remember most. In many parts of the world Catholics were unable to attend Mass for months, driving some of them online for worship and others

By John L. Allen Jr.
If Francis really wants women deacons, this seems an odd way to go about it
- Apr 9, 2020
The pontiff acted Tuesday on one of the recommendations of the recent Synod of Bishops for the Amazon by creating – for the second time in four years – a commission to study whether women might be ordained as deacons.

By John L. Allen Jr.
Will risk of abuse turn the tide on ‘vagabond priests’?
- May 30, 2018
The president of the bishops’ conference in the Ivory Coast has raised anew the problem of clergy who go abroad and never come home, often with no stable community or oversight.

By John L. Allen Jr.

Focus on witchcraft at exorcists’ summit signifies a paradigm shift
- Apr 18, 2018
A burgeoning interest in witchcraft at a Rome gathering of exorcists is one taste of what the north/south shift in Catholicism feels like.

By John L. Allen Jr.
Latest numbers confirm global south as new Catholic center of gravity
- Oct 22, 2017
New Catholic population numbers released in advance of today’s 91st World Mission Day confirm that the southern hemisphere, containing most of the so-called “developing world,” has become the new demographic center of gravity of the Church. Today more than two-thirds of all Catholics live outside the West, and that share is growing all the time.

By Crux Staff
Pope Francis’s eight gifts to the USA on his visit one year ago
- Sep 21, 2016
When Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina was elected to the papacy in March 2013, he wasn’t well-traveled or especially familiar with the United States — and those were precisely the gifts he brought to his 2015 visit to America, the anniversary of which is this week.

By Fr. Dwight Longenecker